How can I make a copy of my shop on a seperate webserver for development purposes?

[mayday]

My shop is now in live, so I'm trying to create a development environment on a seperate websever. This will of course allow me to work on further tweaks to the site, with interrupting the live store.

Prestashop also recommends doing this on there Wiki here: http://www.prestashop.com/wiki/Installing_And_Updating_PrestaShop_Software/#Install_PrestaShop

but they don't say how

So here is what I've done so far:

1) ftp'd a copy of all my live store files to the new development server
2) dumped my live db and restored it to a new db on the development server
3) modified the /config/settings.php to correctly point to this new db
4) modified the robots.txt file so google won't index the this dev version of the site.

Now, I'm stuck. I can log into the /admin (back office) of the dev environment. That works great. I can changes settings, everything.

But the store doesn't work. When I try and view it "nothing happens"

Here's the url of my live shop: www.outdoorstore.ch
Here's the dev environment I'm trying to set up: www.campfire.ch

Thanks in advance for any help on what I did wrong, or still need to do.

Greets, Cory

[Trip]

I have no idea so far but why don't setup a dev-environment on your local computer first?
So you can view the apache error.log files and developing in general should be faster on a local machine.
You can donwload nice preconfigured lampp or xampp "developement environments" from http://www.apachefriends.org/de/index.html
Setup takes a few minutes and debugging should be easier.
Regards und Grüße, trip

[mayday]

Whether I try to replicate my live store on my local computer or on the server that I'm trying to do it on, I'm sure I'd have this same problem.

What are the steps?

Is what I'm trying possible at all? Or do I need to download the standard from Prestashop, install it as if I'm starting from scratch, and then bring this new default install up to the current code on my live environment?

I hope that makes sense.

[Trip]

What you're trying to do is possible and the steps are O.K. but there is obviously a problem.
I tried to replicate such an error (empty page) on my local server by changing the settings.php with wrong values and
setting folder permissions to denie access but I always had warnings as feedback that something is wrong.
So I first would look in the (apache) error and access logs on the developement server if you can find a hint.
If you don't have access we end up to what I first posted.

[pedes]

I don't know if this is still usefull, but i got it work to transfert a complete shop from one to another webserver.

- first backup your database in you old shop (admin-tools-DB backup)
- copy all files from your old webserver to a local computer map (with Filezilla)
- in this local map find : config/settings.inc.php and open it with notepad, here you ganna have the connection settings. change these lines with your new hosting settings:
define('_DB_NAME_', 'YOUR_NEW_DATABASE_NAME);
define('_DB_SERVER_', 'YOUR_NEW_HOST');
define('_DB_USER_', 'YOUR_NEW_DATABASE_USERNAME);
define('_DB_PREFIX_', 'ps_');
define('_DB_PASSWD_', 'YOUR_NEW_DATABASE_PASSWORD');

- import the DB backup to your new webserver database (with PHPMyAdmin)
- copy all files from the local computer map to the new webserver (with filezilla)

- IMPORTANT => change all needed file rights (like in a new installation)

THIS WOULD DO THE TRICK ...

Hope it works for you guys

Kind regards
Peter

[Katmatcreations]

i just use a little webserver called abyss webserver and PHP/MYSQL for a development environment.

Has all the features i need with very little to mess around with once its setup.